Are Cash Transfers Made to Women Spent Like Other Sources of Income?

How cash transfers made to women are
used has important implications for models of household
behavior and for the design of social programs. In this
paper, the authors use the randomized introduction of an
unconditional cash transfer to poor women in rural Ecuador
to analyze the effect of transfers on the food Engel curve.
There are two main findings. First, the authors show that
households randomly assigned to receive Bono de Desarrollo
Humano (BDH) transfers have a significantly higher food
share in expenditures than those that were randomly assigned
to the control group. Second, they show that the rising food
share among BDH beneficiaries is found among households that
have both adult males and females, but not among households
that only have adult females. Bargaining power between men
and women is likely to be important in mixed-adult
households, but not among female-only households, where
there are no men to bargain with. Finally, the authors show
that within mixed-adult households, program effects are only
significant in households in which the initial bargaining
capacity of women was likely to be weak. This pattern of
results is consistent with an increase in the bargaining
power of women in households that received BDH transfers.